Myself and a couple of pals are answering the artistic challenge of interpreting our little ghost girl sprite!
My entry:
Beedrops:
A third secret friend also took a crack at it!
Godzilla
It’s time to close out the reptile block with the biggest and baddest reptile I know! Godzilla, I feel, is one of the quintessential licensed Game Boy game experiences: a well known figure supplied in a surprising medium. While, contextually, it makes a fair amount of sense to have a Godzilla game look like this, I have to imagine the surprise many children felt as they booted this one up for the first time. I certainly was floored the first time I discovered it. Godzilla has a lot of elements many other games we’ve disliked so far feature, but in a package we can actually enjoy. I’m not entirely sure why, but something about the game just has a little more polish and care for the player built in? Hell, there’s even love in the code of the game! What I’m saying is Godzilla is about love.
Also this magazine ad owns.
I didn’t expect this to be a puzzle platformer, but it gave us adorable Kaiju sprites so who could possibly complain?
Kirby’s Dream Land
Here we are! The big one-oh! Kirby’s Dream Land is a wonderful title and it feels like I have so much to say about it and truly nothing at all simultaneously. This is one of those titles I played to death on my Game Boy Pocket, though it would be several years until I learned about Kirby’s now iconic copy ability. To me, he was perfect only as a hungry boy and only n64 titles like smash and Kirby 64 could tell me otherwise. Even after all the success of this franchise, though, I still can’t help but admire its simple roots. Kirby is most certainly a key part of my love for this monochrome system that goes on even to this day.
A lil bit of extra history that I couldn’t fit in the video: Kirby’s original ability was going to be kicking and headbutting enemies like a soccer ball. To go along with the philosophy of making the game accessible to anyone, Sakurai came up with Kirby’s ability to float endlessly and not be conquered by pits. The idea of Kirby sucking a bunch of air to do so, naturally lead to changing from headbutts to sucking in enemies as well.
Development for the game was on a Twin Famicom system that had no implementation of a physical keyboard. All code had to be entered manually using a track ball and an on screen keyboard. While cumbersome to work with, the kit allowed the game’s data processing load to be easily streamlined, leading to smooth animations.
Finally, while I didn’t complete it within the original video itself, as luck would have it I did happen to recently stream all of Kirby’s Dream Land on hard mode! Just me on commentary for this one and there’s a lot of me crying, but it’s all there!
A sweet potato turned into a mint leaf? Maxim Tomato turned into a bag of magic food!? OK whatever, manual! I get the feeling the English writers either didn’t fully agree with the Japanese manual, or straight up couldn’t translate some of it and just guessed.
I’ve been curious for a while what the rest of Extra Mode is like, always bounced off it when playing it myself. Might as well give that a watch too!
Showcase #1
Hey everybody! Now that we hit the ten entry mark, it’s time for our first official interlude! My main philosophy for this series is to play 50 games with concrete starts and ends, but the Game Boy has so many other things to offer! A wide variety of genres and styles were featured on the hand held system, taking advantage of its portability to provide bite sized experiences suitable for playing on the go. Sure, they’re not very deep, but they are still important! Many of the games in this particular video hold a small place in my heart. Some were gifts, some were closely tied to friends, and others were just good-ass games. All of which shaped the nostalgia I hold to this day, even if some of the games are objectively…lacking.
This particular block features both arcade ports and puzzle games featured on the Game Boy, including the grand daddy of them all: Tetris. There’s a LOT to say about Tetris, and admittedly it could have occupied its own segment in itself, but the long and short of it was that the people getting Nintendo the rights to this game knew exactly what they had on their hands. Several legal disputes of dubious moral standing across multiple countries were enacted to make sure the game was bundled with the Game Boy. Instead of Super freakin Mario! Tetris was the biggest of deals.
Hello everyone! Every week I’m going to start rolling out the uncut stream archives for each 50 Shades of Grayscale session. Admittedly, the first few are not going to be incredibly different, but as time goes on there will be quite the hefty batches of footage to peruse, with all the delirium of tackling an overly challenging game you might expect! I will be doing a group of however many videos happened per session, per week, so for short game entries you’ll probably get two videos! Exciting!
This is going to also be my one plug usage, as I am releasing all sessions a week early over on My Patreon so if you like being on the cutting edge of this nonsense by all means throw a couple bucks in there!
Looney Tunes
Welcome back, everybody! A new themed block is upon us, and it was (somewhat hastily) decided to be the Warner Bros block! This, of course, means we’re going to for the most part be experiencing titles from developers Sunsoft. Sunsoft is a bit of an interesting “company” with an interesting lineage. Namely in how much of it is just adaptations and ports? Even as recent as 2018, Sunsoft has been handling ports for titles like Obduction, and even releasing games on the Switch! A quiet constant in the industry.
Howdy folks! It’s time for another uncut session posting! Another double feature, but probably the last one for a while. Things got a lot longer from this point onward. Enjoy the descent into madness!
Also, happy birthday to Super Mario Land 2! Not to mention our boy Wario. Truly a momentous day in Game Boy history.
Animaniacs
heLLOOOOOOOO thread! Hope you’re ready for another proper entry! We’re continuing our Warner Bros block with…the Warner Bros [sub]and the warner sister[/sub]! This will be our only Sunsoft free entry for this block, a surprising entry from Konami and Factor 5. I always found it odd that Animaniacs had completely different versions per game console, and equally weird that the Genesis adaptation moved to the Game Boy. I think it was the right move, overall, even if some of the wilder set pieces were lost to the smaller tech. A lot of fun detail was still put into the game despite everything!
Snake count: 8
Progress on this weeks full episode might be a little halted, worst case scenario is it comes a week later. in the meantime please enjoy another uncut stream!
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Why hey there! Long time no see! Thank you for your patience as we get back to business with episode 13. The lucky number proved most prophetic due to a number of factors that stacked into what amounted to a mini hiatus of sorts. In any case, we’re back, with a weapon to surpass Sneaky Snakes. Our penultimate Sunsoft entry holds their truest trademarks, and over 5 hours of trying and bashing my head against a wall/ceiling was cut down to what you see today. Despite it all, Gremlins 2 is one of my favorite movies, and I wanted to do a little something special for it. I hope you enjoy what I managed!
Oh, uh, also we talk about Japanese King of the Hill in this. You should check that out.
Sunsoft is good at making games, why did they make a game that’s like, this? This just seems actively hateful of the player tbh! “Let’s start this stage with a ridiculously hard jump requiring frame perfect inputs and if you fail you hit a spike and take more damage!” Plus whatever that lightning-fast auto platform was up to.
Congrats on setting fire to an abomination birthed from your own body Mogwai, now go to bed
Got a meaty batch of uncut streams today! Here are the fully captured trials and tribulations of Sneaky Snakes! I will generally only be posting singular sessions of these per week, but these were not traditionally stacked a week apart so I figured I’d just throw em together. Longer games will be broken up a bit more in the future. Enjoy!
Oh also while you’re here, enjoy this deleted scene from Gremlins.
Batman
Well hey there! Guess who forgot it was Friday! Me. That’s who. Here we are with our final entry in this Sunsoft cavalcade, though probably not the last title we’ll see from them in this lineup. I, for one, am glad we have a break from them. It’s been kinda hard to write interesting stuff about them. Information can be a little sparse! In any case, please enjoy the riveting tale of tiny Batman!
Hello again, dinosaur enthusiasts! It’s time for another UNCUT edition! While not as laborious as Sneaky Snakes, Baby T-Rex certainly took the full length of an entire stream to get through, so there was plenty of fat to trim in editing. Hopefully there’s some fun left in the original footage. God I hope so. I think we did a lot of dumb voices. Also: no more flicker forever now!
Kirby’s Dream Land 2
Hello friends! It’s time for an extra chufty entry for an extra chufty boy. Kirby’s Dream Land 2 was an entry I completely missed the boat on back in the day, despite it bringing back and even introducing some of Kirby’s most iconic features. After playing it roughly 3 times for this video alone, I can confidently say I was missing out. Few games on the 50 shades list are as well crafted from top to bottom, showing exactly what the Game Boy could do with the right applied effort. A special game calls for a special guest, as well, and I am very thankful to medibot for lending their talents for our little program.
Have a great day! Also check out this American ad for the game I showed a small segment of. It’s wild.
Another stream archive for the pile, and the first one I have to break up because it was in multiple weekly segments! Enjoy the thrilling unedited adventures of The Bayou.
Toy Story
Howdy yall! It’s time for our next block of good ol licensed games: The Disney Block! Kicking us off is a game that was a fond staple of my childhood, though admittedly all of that is directed to the console versions. I somehow had a copy of both console and Game Boy edition of this game, and I distinctly remember my 90s brain being very impressed that they could replicate the rendered sprites of the consoles. I also thought if I dug deep enough into the hill my house was built on, I’d surely find a dinosaur. I thought a lot of things! Blowing it up to 720p almost certainly did it no favors, though.
For those of you that noticed the game UI during some of the clips, I direct you to the only known recording of the documentary about Disney Interactive’s cooperation with the animation studios, featured on the recent re-release of Lion King and Aladdin. You just cant remove that UI! Bummer.
cant fuckin believe theres no snake in this one. they cut out everything good
Another uncut entry for ya! The thrilling conclusion of Tail Gator: the novelization.
